Art exhibition listings

By Enru Lin / Staff reporter

Fri, Jun 07, 2013 - Page 10

With over 15 million motor scooters licensed as of March, Taiwan is the most scooter-dense country in the world. Scooters in Taipei: Chien Hsin-chan Solo Exhibition (機車台北—簡信昌攝影個展) is a look at scooters in Taiwan’s capital city. Chien Hsin-chan(簡信昌), who programs software at a Top 500 company, was a finalist in the 2011 TIVAC Young Photographer Award (2011 TIVAC攝影新人獎) with his black-and-white snapshots of scooters. Since 2011, Chien has extended the series with more shots taken from the back of his own scooter. “I could only shoot when the traffic lights permitted, and due to the limited time, often I could not get the right composition, or I sometimes lost the chance altogether,” said Chien in his gallery notes. His results are rare and fleeting moments in life spans of these ubiquitous utilities, for instance a mother with a toddler lolling precariously off to the side, deep in sleep.

Lucid Dreaming: A Solo Exhibition by Yu Liao-chi (清明夢—廖祈羽個展) are single-channel videos that create the illusion of lucid dreaming for the viewer. Works use pedestrian but indispensable events, like eating, to activate the templates of a viewer’s memory. At the same time, looping cotton-candy colored scenes are embedded with surreal, thrilling and sometimes terrifying moments, like a calm attacker with a blood-orange tomato and a knife, to force viewers to move beyond their known experience and to freely confront their fears, much in the way that a dreamer must during lucid dreaming.

Paper art gets an update at Roaming Light: The Fantasy World on Paper at the Suho Memorial Paper Culture Foundation. Guest artists are Wandering Cloud (行雲朵朵), a three-piece ensemble best-known for using animation and kinetic tools to provoke viewer interaction. For this exhibit, they were asked to apply their concept and technologies to the primitive medium of paper.

Qipao: Memory, Modernity and Fashion tells the story of an enduring piece of Chinese fashion, the qipao. The National Taiwan Museum brings together 144 antique dresses from private collectors and the Fu Jen Catholic University, and organized under five themes: Women’s Qipao Tales, the Bridal Qipao Collection, Three Generations of Women, Beauty is in the Details and A Century of Qipao Evolution. The exhibition also features a “fitting room” where visitors can dress up in virtual qipaos, plus 20th century paintings depicting how the garment was styled across Taiwan’s history.

Releasing from Life & Paradigm — Ying-yu Lin Solo Exhibition (放.生.大.典－林英玉個展) is an outdoor sculpture garden populated with human mutants. Artist Lin Ying-yu (林英玉) thinks of them as ambassadors of a place that’s purer, younger and perhaps happier. One humanoid, an alabaster beauty with a headful of spinning neon lights, shows off its figure in a wanton disregard of reason and utilitarianism. The Tetrapod Goddess (消波女神), a response to the devastation of Typhoon Morakot, are eight voluptuous humanoids that bless the earth and guard against evil. Indoors at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lin is also showing 12 giant carnivalesque paintings that illustrate the world from which his sculptures come.

Pedro Tseng (曾長生) is a retired diplomat who launched second and third careers as an art professor and painter. His Digital Aura series, a 10-year project that goes on show tomorrow, are paintings of contemporary living spaces in Taiwan. Tseng mixes Cubist, Surrealist and Fauvist techniques to build the illusion of cold light on canvas — a digital and ghostly effect that makes a statement about how society views space today.